About State Law Handbook

We publish the definitive US state-by-state legal information reference — plain-English, sourced, attorney-reviewed, and always free.

Our mission

US state laws are hard to research. The primary sources — state statutes, agency guidance, court decisions — are scattered across dozens of official websites, written in dense legal language, and updated at different times without any central signal. The alternatives are worse: paywalled reference sites, biased law firm blogs, unreliable forums, and AI Overviews that confidently invent statutes that don't exist.

State Law Handbook exists to fix that. We publish the same information you would find in a state code or agency handbook, translated into plain English, sourced to the underlying authority, and dated so you know when it was last checked. Then we do it for every state, so you can compare, and we update it as the law changes.

What we cover

We cover the areas of law that vary by state — the ones where "what's the rule?" doesn't have one answer for the whole country. That's about 100 topics, including tenant rights, HOA rules, LLC formation, sales and income tax, minimum wage, non-competes, DUI, divorce, child custody and support, cannabis, gun laws, homeschool requirements, window tint, motorcycle helmet, dog bite liability, lemon law, small claims, expungement, and many more.

Each of these topics gets its own page for each of the 51 US jurisdictions (all 50 states plus the District of Columbia), plus a cross-state comparison hub, plus dedicated pages ranking states on common decisions ("Best states for X"). At full build the site covers more than 5,100 individual state-topic pages.

Who we serve

Most of our readers are individuals making a personal decision that turns on state law — signing a lease, buying a car, starting a small business, filing a small claims case, moving to a new state, planning an estate. About a quarter are small business owners or freelancers who need to know the rules where they operate. The rest are legal professionals, HR staff, journalists, and researchers using us as a starting point for their own primary-source work.

Everyone gets the same information. There is no paywalled tier, no member-only content, no "premium answers." Every state-topic page, comparison, and guide is free to read.

Editorial standards

Every page on State Law Handbook meets the same standards. If a page fails any of these checks, it does not publish:

• Sourced. Every material claim links to the state statute, agency guidance page, or court decision that supports it. We prefer Justia, LII Cornell, official state legislature websites, and state agency publications.
• Dated. Every page shows a "Last verified" date at the top so you know when a human last checked the content against the underlying sources.
• Reviewed. Our highest-stakes topics — DUI, family law, criminal defense, business formation, employment — are reviewed by US-licensed attorneys practicing in the relevant state, and their name and bar number appear on the page.
• Neutral. When there are two sides to a legal question — landlord and tenant, employer and employee, buyer and seller — we cover both. We do not steer readers toward action.
• Disclaimed. Every page carries a prominent notice that we provide legal information, not legal advice, and that readers with a specific situation should consult a licensed attorney in their state.

These standards are documented in more detail on our Editorial Policy page.

Who runs the site

State Law Handbook is published by an independent editorial team of legal researchers, plain-language writers, and SEO operators, coordinated from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and supported by a network of US-licensed attorney reviewers.

Our writers do not hold themselves out as attorneys. The people who write our pages are professional legal researchers — some with paralegal training — who read the underlying statutes, agency guidance, and case law and translate what they find into plain English. Where a page has been reviewed by a US-licensed attorney, the reviewer's name, state licensure, and bar number are visible on the page itself. Every attorney in our reviewer network is listed with their credentials on our Attorney Reviewer Credentials page.

Editorial independence

No advertiser, affiliate partner, or sponsor decides what we publish or how we cover a topic. Attorney partner networks such as LegalMatch, Avvo, LegalShield, and LegalZoom pay us a referral fee when a reader connects with one of their attorneys through our site — but they do not choose which attorneys are shown, review our content before publication, or influence our editorial judgment. Ad networks (AdSense, Ezoic, Mediavine at different stages) place inventory across our pages based on their own algorithms; we do not sell direct ads to law firms or legal service providers who might have a stake in how a specific topic is framed.

Full details of our commercial relationships are on our Advertising Disclosure page.

How we pay for it

We keep State Law Handbook free by three revenue streams: display advertising (through mainstream ad networks — not direct law-firm placements), attorney referral partnerships (readers who click through to book a consultation with a licensed attorney via our partners), and a weekly newsletter (State Law Weekly) supported by relevant B2B sponsors. From time to time we also sell state-specific starter kits and checklists (LLC formation, cottage food business, tenant rights) as low-cost downloadable products.

What we do not do: sell our own legal advice, sell reader data, take payment for editorial coverage, or take money from any party who might expect favorable treatment on a specific topic.

Contact us

The best way to reach us depends on what you need:

For a form-based contact option, see our Contact page. For legal notices (DMCA, service of process), see our DMCA Policy and Terms of Service.